Thrive Automation: Achieving significant RPA services revenue and massive team growth
Thrive Automation began its journey into robotic process automation (RPA) implementation a few years before the founding of the managed service provider (MSP). In the late 2010s, Thrive Automation’s parent company observed the growing benefits of RPA as part of technology-related consulting projects. Established in 2019 with a strong interest in RPA technology, Thrive Automation positioned itself to play a role in helping companies establish and manage a digital workforce, alongside the expectation that RPA’s trickle-in-demand would surge across the business landscape.
Like traditional MSPs, Thrive Automation implements technology support-focused use cases involving systems or network maintenance. However, Thrive Automation’s unique entry point means that it also specializes in project management and business analysis — giving mid-market customers options when dealing with more complex, line-of-business, specific use cases that are driven by emerging requirements in time-sensitive markets.
Thrive Automation’s Head of Development Haadi Ladha, Regional Sales Manager Joe Pierce, and Digital Innovation Advisor Grayson Bass recognized a growing demand for automation in traditional ERP and CRM solutions, and RPA stood out as a natural solution. More recently, this same trio began to see potential application in data migration use cases with companies trying to use distributed ledger technology, identifying an opportunity to marry RPA with blockchain.
Located in the Greater Toronto Area, Canada, Thrive Automation improves business efficiency and simplifies processes for its customers.
With customers in entirely different market segments and industries, the Thrive Automation team cast a wide net when searching for RPA vendors. As an MSP, Haadi grew his team of RPA developers to leverage each of the leading automation platforms, assigning projects to a platform based on the project needs.
The Thrive Automation RPA team led by Haadi Ladha, Head of Development, and Grayson Bass, Digital Innovation Advisor.
However, the Thrive Automation team quickly realized that the traditional per-bot model offered by traditional RPA vendors priced Thrive Automation’s small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) out of automation. During their search for RPA vendors, Haadi and came across an article describing ElectroNeek as an upcoming start-up, and they immediately became interested in the licensing model ElectroNeek offers compared to the traditional model to meet the needs of their SMB clients.
That interest quickly turned into a partnership, purchasing a Silver tier partnership with ElectroNeek in December 2020.
In ElectroNeek, Thrive Automation found an RPA partner to provide SMBs with automation solutions on a number of levels. The Thrive Automation team connected with ElectroNeek customer success teams to review the subscription-based bot license model, discovering new ways to leverage that model for different sized clients. This process included lead generation provided by ElectroNeek, which led to two closed clients in the first six months of the partnership.
One of the standouts of the ElectroNeek RPA ecosystem for Thrive Automation from the get go was the flexible web data capture capabilities, particularly the bot interactions that Haadi’s team could develop for browser-based applications. Projects in this area stood out as an affordable and scalable solution for SMBs.
One of the earliest bots created by the Thrive Automation team in ElectroNeek Studio Pro.
As an early partner of ElectroNeek, the Thrive Automation team worked closely with ElectroNeek’s customer support and product development teams. The collaborative nature of the partnership created a recipe for RPA success and growth, with Haadi and his team providing feedback on releases and features, and the ElectroNeek support teams providing responsive support to solve problems if they arise.
A standout moment of the partnership between Thrive Automation and ElectroNeek within the first year were the moments when Haadi and his team would request features for specific RPA tools that would later enter the ElectroNeek product roadmap for addition down the road — a telltale sign of the collaborative nature of this growing partnership.
Most importantly, by collaborating with ElectroNeek, Thrive Automation could deliver creative automation solutions to SMB clients with the subscription-based licensing model allowing those clients to afford the buy-in cost of an automation project.
In the first three months as an ElectroNeek partner, Thrive Automation…
- Collaborated alongside ElectroNeek’s customer success and executive teams to best leverage the subscription-based pricing model for their mid-market clients.
- Worked closely with ElectroNeek’s product teams to solve any technical issues, while requesting features that appeared on ElectroNeek’s future product roadmap.
- Closed 2+ RPA client contracts, with additional smaller contracts made possible by the licensing model.
In the first six months as an ElectroNeek partner, Thrive Automation…
- Shifted their RPA mentality from simply solving the mundane, to helping end-clients of all sizes grow and scale their business.
- Attributed 50% of their RPA business unit’s growth to ElectroNeek.
- Achieved a 10x return on investment in the ElectroNeek Silver partnership tier.
- Hired six RPA developers, 50% of which are ElectroNeek-focused RPA developers.
Using the ElectroNeek RPA ecosystem on a number of projects brought about a shift in mentality for Thrive Automation from simply helping to solve mundane problems with automation to pitching projects designed to help a company grow and scale.
This shift in mentality came from a web data capture project Thrive Automation signed with one of their clients trying to gather data on a global scale across multiple sites to make business decisions. Part of the problem with this data gathering was the sheer scale of it — the client had no idea where to even begin. How do you even go about this scale of data gathering?
Leveraging the flexible data capture features of ElectroNeek’s RPA tools, Thrive Automation digitized the process, creating a digital workforce that grows and scales depending on the particular needs of the client. Through this project, the Thrive Automation team estimated that it would take more than 150 human employees to accomplish what this automation could do, with the project ultimately reducing human labor by 60%.
By establishing a digital workforce, this client’s leadership could now leverage the gathered data to empower their decision-making, with a renewed focus on growing and scaling their business. Thrive Automation now manages and deploys on-demand a critical workforce for this client.
This shift in mentality drives Thrive Automation’s focus towards the mid-market in the coming years of the Thrive Automation and ElectroNeek partnership. Through additional collaboration with ElectroNeek’s Chief Innovation Officer and Co-Founder Dmitry Karpov, the Thrive Automation team plans to truly master the subscription-based pricing model for their clients.
The Thrive Automation team has a grand goal of helping Canadians scale their business through the use of RPA, and the partnership with ElectroNeek will help Haadi, Joe, Grayson and their teams tackle the small- and mid-sized markets by storm.
“When looking at RPA vendors, the potential scalability of Electroneek solutions is unparalleled. The flexible commercial models have allowed us to offer creative & infinitely scalable solutions to a wider range of clients. In my experience, there is no solution that can quite meet SMB and Mid-Market customers the way ElectroNeek can. In the first year of our partnership we had the opportunity to collaborate closely with customer success, product teams, and the executive team. The responsiveness of these teams and the ability to get fixes and improvements in place quickly made a huge difference in us not just sticking with ElectroNeek, but becoming advocates for the platform.”
